Part of the theatre around the dramatic fall of the authoritarian and excessively ostentatious former Speaker Anita Annet Among closed on Monday when West Budama County South MP Jacob Oboth-Oboth won election as the new 12th Parliament boss. Thomas Tayebwa, the incumbent Deputy Speaker from the 11th Parliament, won re-election to the position. Oboth-Oboth secured 441 votes out of 519, or 85 percent. Tayebwa took 457 votes out of the same 519 total votes cast, giving him 88.1 percent. Both men belong to the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM). In the high drama and hullabaloo of Among’s political demise and the scramble for Parliament, observers missed a profound point.
Having the ruling or majority party hold both the Speaker and Deputy Speaker positions looks democratically backward in a multiparty system. Uganda should consider reforming it. In the UK House of Commons, the so-called “Mother of Parliaments”, three Deputy Speakers serve (who hold the historic titles of Chairman of Ways and Means, First Deputy Chairman, and Second Deputy Chairman. The tradition requires that if the elected Speaker originally came from the Government benches, the senior Deputy (the Chairman of Ways and Means) and the Second Deputy Chairman must come from the Opposition side of the House.
In Canada and Australia, where there is more than one Deputy Speaker, the posts are split between the government and the Opposition. In India, in the Lower House (the Lok Sabha), since 1996, a firm democratic convention has given the post of Deputy Speaker to the main Opposition party (or an Opposition coalition) to ensure accountability. Things take an interesting turn in Germany. In the German parliament, the position of President of the Bundestag (their equivalent of the Speaker) follows a strict, unbreakable convention: the largest single parliamentary group nominates the President.
However, because Germany uses a proportional representation system, the government is almost always a coalition of multiple smaller parties. This often creates a scenario in which party A is the largest single party but sits in Opposition because parties B, C, and D form a majority coalition government. Under German tradition, party A still chooses the Speaker. The majority coalition willingly hands the gavel to an Opposition member because they view the Speaker as a servant of the entire parliament, not the Executive branch. It gets even more complicated in deeply divided post-conflict parliaments like Northern Ireland.
Keeping the Speaker position away from the ruling majority is often legally mandated to prevent the dominant group from oppressing the minority. In the Northern Ireland Assembly (Stormont), the rules require a cross-community vote: the Speaker must secure a majority from both sides. As a result, the Speaker often comes from a minority or neutral middle-ground party. If Kampala were Stormont, Nobert Mao, not Oboth-Oboth, would probably have been elected as Speaker. Even in Africa, where winner-takes-all politics is rampant, you occasionally get a surprise.
Following the elections of December 2020, Ghana’s parliament achieved something Ugandans would struggle to understand: a near-impossible split. The ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) won exactly 137 seats each, with one independent holding the tie-breaking vote. When it was time to vote for the Speaker by secret ballot, several ruling party MPs broke ranks. In a chaotic and historic vote, Alban Bagbin, a veteran politician from the opposition NDC party, was elected Speaker of Parliament. At the same time, the country’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, belonged to the rival NPP.
For the first time in Ghana’s history, an opposition Speaker presided over a government’s legislative agenda. It forced a culture of mandatory consensus, as the government could not pass any budget or law without negotiating with the Opposition Speaker and his party. Sharing House leadership is not just some cute decoration. If every single person controlling the microphone and enforcing the rules belongs to the ruling party, the Opposition has little reason to trust that the debates are fair. Leaving a Deputy Speaker post to the Opposition also provides a structural safeguard.
It offers the possibility for minority voices not to be completely silenced or bypassed by the ruling majority during intense debates, as happened under the Among speakership. Sharing these roles reminds both sides that Parliament belongs to all elected representatives, not just a tool for the current party in power. But no. Here we are, with 60 opposition MPs effectively relegated to second-class members of the House. A House that, shamefully, also has no woman as Speaker or Deputy Speaker for the first time in 25 years. Oboth-Oboth made some enlightened noises upon taking the Chair, and it not being a throne, but even if he honours them, they will not make up for the representation void. Only an institutional reform will fix this.